Tag: cloud computing

Creating a 1.3 Million vCPU Grid on AWS using EC2 Spot Instances and TIBCO GridServer

This Amazon AWS blog post provides a great insight into the benefits of the cloud computing in general and Amazon AWS in particular.  The whole thing is well worth the read, but here are a few of my favorite bits.

The scale:

The grid grew to 61,299 Spot Instances (1.3 million vCPUs drawn from 34 instance types spanning 3 generations of EC2 hardware) as planned, with just 1,937 instances reclaimed and automatically replaced during the run, and cost $30,000 per hour to run, at an average hourly cost of $0.078 per vCPU. If the same instances had been used in On-Demand form, the hourly cost to run the grid would have been approximately $93,000.

The size of the Amazon AWS customers:

1.3 million vCPUs (5x the size of the largest on-premises grid)

The evolution of computing power over the last few years:

To give you a sense of the compute power, we computed that this grid would have taken the #1 position on the TOP 500 supercomputer list in November 2007 by a considerable margin, and the #2 position in June 2008. Today, it would occupy position #360 on the list.

Now, just for fun, exercise the idea of building something like this in house…

PHP application logging with Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Monolog

AWS Developer Blog ran this post a while back – “PHP application logging with Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Monolog“, in which they show how to use Monolog and Amazon CloudWatch together in any PHP application.  It goes beyond a basic configuration of connecting the two, all the way into setting up log metrics, etc.

Distributed architecture concepts I learned while building a large payments system

Gergely Orosz, an engineer who worked at Uber on the large scale payments system used by the company, shares some of the distributed architecture concepts he had to learn in the blog post titled “Distributed architecture concepts I learned while building a large payments system“.

The article is very well written and easy to follow. But it’s also a goldmine of links to other resources on the subject.  Here’s a list links and concepts for a quick research and/or click-through later:

Get Started with Blockchain Using the new AWS Blockchain Templates

One of the greatest things about the Amazon AWS services is that they save a tonne of time on the reinventing the wheel.  There are numerous technologies out there and nobody has the time to dive deep, learn, and try all of them.  Amazon AWS often provides ready-made templates and configurations for people who just want to try a technology or a tool, without investing too much time (and money) into figuring out all the options and tweaks.

“Get Started with Blockchain Using the new AWS Blockchain Templates” is one example of such predefined and pre-configured setup, for those who want to play around with Blockchain.  Just think of how much time it would have taken somebody who just wants to spin up their own Etherium network with some basic tools and services just to check the technology out.  With the predefined templates you can be up and running in minutes, and, once you are comfortable, you can spend more time rebuilding the whole thing, configuring and tweaking everything.

Using CloudFoundation to Build, Manage, and Deploy CloudFormation Templates

J Cole Morrison has this rather lengthy blog post on how to use CloudFoundation to simplify and automate the management of your Amazon AWS cloud infrastructure.  AWS CloudFormation is a great tool, but it gets complex real fast with larger setups, so CloudFoundation comes to the rescue.